1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to reducing power and capacity consumption in storage systems.
2. Description of Related Art
According to recent trends in the storage industry, the amount of enterprise data is rapidly increasing, while information technology budgets are simultaneously being constrained. Thus, there is currently great interest in technologies for reducing the amount of data that must be stored. One such technology, data de-duplication, relies on the fact that a large amount of the data stored in a particular storage environment already has redundant portions also stored within that storage environment. During the data writing process, a typical de-duplication function will break down the data stream into smaller chunks of data and compare the content of each chunk of data to chunks previously stored in the storage environment. If the same chunk has already been stored, then the storage system will just make a new link to the already-stored chunk, rather than storing the new chunk which has same content. This function reduces the overall size of data stored in the storage environment, and thus, this technology has been adopted in many storage systems, such as in VTL (Virtual Tape Library) or CAS (Contents Addressed Storage) products. US Pat. Appl. Pub. No. 2005/0216669, entitled “Efficient Data Storage System”, to Zhu et al., filed May 24, 2005, the entire disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference, teaches a typical method for storing data with a de-duplication function.
Furthermore, due to the increases in the amount of data being stored, the power consumption required for storing data has also been increasing. Power consumed directly by storage devices and the associated cooling systems required for cooling the storage devices are becoming a significant factor in the cost of operating a data center. In addition, forecasts predict that in the near future, some datacenters may have insufficient power capacity due to the high-density of added equipment. Therefore, achieving greater power efficiency is becoming a critical issue to many datacenters. Accordingly, it would be desirable to reduce the amount of power required for operating the storage devices in a data center, and thereby reduce the overall cost of operation for the data center. It would further be desirable to reduce power consumption while also reducing the amount of data to be stored, such as through use of de-duplication technology discussed above. However, the prior art does not teach or suggest any technology for reducing power consumption in a storage system while simultaneously storing data more efficiently by performing de-duplication processing on the data.